Please remember that next week is a short week as we are closed for Chinese national holidays on Thursday 15th and Friday 16th September. We hope you enjoy the long weekend.

Just a quick reminder about arrival and departures for students not taking the bus: As staff have meetings early in the morning we cannot guarantee a member of staff to be in the classroom until 8.15. Please ensure you stay with your child until 8.15am.

After school, children should be collected from the Early Years entrance. After CCAs, they should be collected from the Main Entrance.

Stars of the Week

In 5A, is Star of the Week is Everlyne Tan, for excellent work performing and writing poems this week.

In 5B, Aleck Mackenzie is Star of the Week, for working hard in his writing, reading and mathematics, and for volunteering to help others!

English

As we continue our Living Things topic, so our writing will continue to reflect this. Having looked at and performed animal poetry this week, next week we will focus on satire and humor. We will look specifically at Roald Dahl’s poetry collection ‘Dirty Beasts’, and begin to imitate his rhythm, rhyme and narrative style in our own poetry. We will storyboard his ideas before mapping them on to our own, and will work collaboratively to devise our work. We will be focusing on making effective vocabulary choices, and structuring our work effectively.

Maths

Next week in Maths we will complete our work on Number Sense. We will be applying our understanding of place value and conversion to the trickier concept of time, and will practice reading an analogue clock before answering time related questions. In Mr. Scrymgeour’s group, we will look at time word problems. In Mr. Johnson’s group, we will look at counting forwards and backwards in time, as well as beginning to look at some broader problem solving skills, answering questions such as ‘On what day is the 1000th hour of the year?’. Similarly, in Ms. Preston’s set we will be applying our understanding of units of measuring time to open-ended investigations. As we complete our work on solving number problems, we will be embedding strategies for solving these, such as using the RUCSAC approach (Read, Understand, Choose, Solve, Answer, and Check).

Topic

After our exciting Entry Point this week, next week we will continue our new topic ‘Existing, Endangered, Extinct’. We will complete our Knowledge Harvest, where we will find out and share what we already know. Then, we will begin looking at ways of classifying and sorting animals and plants. We will use Carroll diagrams, Venn diagrams and flow charts to present our learning, and will ask questions about the areas where classification overlap. We will begin to look at more specific animal classification labels, such as arthropods and exoskeletons!